Yeah, I couldn't help myself. Interesting, as I was the exact opposite. I was on iOS, got bored with it (static icons are so 2007), went to WP7 over three years ago and haven't looked back (on WP 8.1 now). I gave OSX a fair shot for about 6 months or so, but I ended up really just using the iMac as a VM server for a Windows image, so that didn't make sense either. So I sold it, built a homebrew that's running Windows 8.1 and couldn't be happier.

Brent Jenkins wrote:

By the way, Safari on OSX works really well, much better than Chrome or Firefox in my opinion

But then you have to use OSX; isn't that like burning down the house for the termites? :cool:

Email signatures kill me. In the States, it's common for some professionals to include degrees after their names (e.g. doctors will put Quack McRubbish, M.D.). However, that's actually trickled down to some putting MBA after their names (even worse on LinkedIn). Those get mercilessly devoured by many. Disclaimer: I also have an MBA, but do you know what my signature is? Just my name. That's it. Oh, and the occasional made up title I assign myself (my nearly-silent protest to nonsense titles like "Internal Sales Support Analyst II"; you're an assistant, just put that), such as "Grand Chancellor" and "Commodore".

OriginalGriff wrote:

One of my great pleasures was being able to shoot a certain female customer (who knew nothing about her job) directly in the stomach from about three feet.

Let's keep it holy now... :)

This happened years ago, but I just remembered it and thought I'd share: the first company for whom I worked out of college often had me complete RFPs (request for proposal) for potential clients and partners. One of them was a gem; here are two questions: Q: Are there any foreseeable complications? If so, list them. A: Fair enough, but there was nothing to report here, so no worries. Q: Are there any unforeseeable complications? If so, list them. A: I think I just put "probably", if memory serves. If I'd listed one, wouldn't I have had to move it to the foreseeable list? I felt like Kirk was trying to make my head explode.

This happened years ago, but I just remembered it and thought I'd share: the first company for whom I worked out of college often had me complete RFPs (request for proposal) for potential clients and partners. One of them was a gem; here are two questions: Q: Are there any foreseeable complications? If so, list them. A: Fair enough, but there was nothing to report here, so no worries. Q: Are there any unforeseeable complications? If so, list them. A: I think I just put "probably", if memory serves. If I'd listed one, wouldn't I have had to move it to the foreseeable list? I felt like Kirk was trying to make my head explode.

- Of course not, and I never really thought that many people customized their Windows colors that much. However, I use the Bing Desktop, so I get a new bg image and color theme each day. Keeps things fresh. - Total size when selecting multiple: yes. Version information when selecting single: no. TBH, I can't imagine why I'd want to see version information in file explorer (that's what the properties dialog is for, after all), but to each his own, I suppose. - You know the answer to that. Like it or not, it's not going away anytime soon. - This is easily resolved once you install your pdf reader of choice and set as default (or whatever). With a fresh installation, the only PDF reader installed is the metro version, which is a step up from the no reader installed of versions past. Your first two points are all about lost configuration options, and your last two are about not wanting to configure your installation. Sorry, but can't have it both ways.

I can't find the article I read about it, but apparently he was fired over the Nokia deal. TL/DR: Ballmer wanted Nokia, board didn't, he threw a hissy fit and got his way, at least in the short run.

Is there, or is there any chance of having, an RSS feed for the daily news? I'm trying to migrate away from email for that sort of thing wherever possible, so thought I'd ask.

_Maxxx_ wrote:

I have also had to close it and re-open once as the intellisense refused to pick up some new classes that had been added - leaving red squiggles a-plenty even though it would build clean.

If you are always getting latest from source control when opening a project, disable that, or you can write a batch file to delete your *.suo files before you open a solution (though of course you'll lose your startup project and open files and who knows what other conveniences). Kind of sucks, but that was MSFT's response to our company's complaint about the squiggles (apparently the async loading fails), as opposed to, I don't know, fixing the bug. Our situation was for Silverlight projects, so YMMV.

Exactly; I'm a free market advocate, but I'm also an advocate that federal and state governments should provide infrastructure (roads being the most common example). That's not from an idealist perspective; I just don't see why we should have wasted resources of 3 or 4 lines going over the poles that are doing the same thing, just for different companies. I think it's safe to say that internet connection has become part of the infrastructure of the US and other developed countries. My $0.02: net neutrality is an important concept, and the barriers to entry for ISPs are way too high to encourage startup competition (not just capital investment, but also regulatory concerns), so I'm not convinced that the US version of the free market is adequate to address this dilemma. It sucks, but that's the reality we're in. I think at this point, while far from perfect, one solution would be service providers bidding on service areas, and those companies would have to meet certain standards (pricing, speed, uptime, etc.).

I've lived and worked in TX and FL (both work-at-will states), and every company I've heard of that will release an employee immediately after giving two weeks notice has gone ahead and paid them out for those two weeks. Since I've literally seen dozens of companies do this in both states, I think there has to be a legal reason (if not a requirement, then it at least makes things look better if you were to file suit or something like that). If you know someone that works in HR, I'd give him/her a call. Depending on your income level, it might be worth paying a lawyer a hundred bucks or so for a consultation.

No, my dates are formatted as 'mm/dd/yyyy' in my IDE (TOAD for SQL Server).

Meant 11/30/2013 for both; corrected. Thanks.

Yep, thanks; edited.

Ha, yes, however all of our hosting, devs and customers are U.S-based, so that does seem the natural route to go :)

It's not, and it's also joining another table (the table in question is the child, and it's being linked to the parent), but I've even tried eliminating different parameters, and that didn't make a difference. However, removing the join, i.e. making the query as simple as possible, did result in a positive difference. So, that does lead me to think about the execution plan, but the data is nearly the same in our dev dbs as production, so that would seem strange that a different execution plan would be generated, though that may be the case.

Yeah, I definitely thought about partitioning as the cause, but wouldn't I see the same results for equal/greater-than-or-equal to the same date?

For the life of me, I can't explain this. This isn't intended to be a programming question, more a "nope, don't believe it, even if I'm seeing it" thing. We host our main app's data in SQL Azure, and we have information in a given table w/ part of the primary key as a datetime (has month-end mutual fund data). One particular function seemed to be taking too long, so we started investigating this afternoon. If I run a given statement w/ asofdate = '11/30/2013, query takes 20 seconds. Seems slow. If I run the same statement, changing only asofdate = '10/31/2013', query takes 0.1 seconds. Odd. No significant # of diff recs between those two dates (26,488 for Nov vs. 26,382 for Oct). So now I'm thinking it's either the way those 11/30 recs were physically stored, or something special about that particular date, until... If I run the same statement w/ asofdate >= '11/30/2013' (most recent date in db right now), it again takes 0.1 seconds. Cannot replicate anything close to this in our on-site SQL Server dev dbs. How the elephant can asofdate >= '11/30/2013' ever be faster than = '11/30/2013'?

Dan Neely wrote:

I can still get away with just a tshirt and denim shorts for a few hours

One can never get away with denim shorts unless one is Jessica Simpson in the Dukes of Hazzard movie.